Laramie

By Charlie Petersen and Laramie Plains Museum

While it was still part of Dakota Territory, the town of Laramie was founded in 1868 with the arrival of the Union Pacific Railroad. Laramie s placement on the high plains at an elevation of 7,200 feet has
not made for an easy existence, but the hardy ranching families and cowboys, with their cattle hunkered down against the winds and snow, survived in spite of their harsh surroundings and even thrived in this unique eastern Wyoming town. This is the place where the infamous Jack McCall hid from the authorities, where Teddy Roosevelt rode the range, and where Butch Cassidy was held at the Wyoming Territorial Prison. From its early, rowdy days as an end-of-the-tracks tent town on the railroad, with gambling halls and an active nightlife, through the growing-up years of mills, quarries, and local wartime heroes, to the establishment of Wyoming s only state university, Laramie s remarkable story is told here through historic photographs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Jul 4, 2007
• ISBN: 9781439618455

Charlie Petersen

With the assistance of Connie Lindmier and Mary Mountain at the Laramie Plains Museum, local historian and retired teacher Charlie Petersen gives an impressive overview of his hometown�s history. Petersen used images from the museum�s archives as well as from private collections and the state archives.

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State.

INTRODUCTION

The year was 1819, or thereabouts, and a French Canadian trapper by the name of Jacques LaRamee headed out for another season to trap beaver. He set up camp in the western part of the Dakota Territory, along a river that would eventually carry a corruption of his name—Laramie. This area would later become the Wyoming Territory. The Arapaho Indians, nomadic as they were, had lived and worked this land from time immemorial and felt that this whole area belonged to them. When they discovered this white man trapping beaver on their land, they murdered LaRamee, chopped a hole in the ice covering the river, and stuffed his body through the hole and into the water, hoping that the body would not be discovered until spring.

Several locations would be named after the Frenchman, including a town, the high plains surrounding the town of Laramie, a mountain peak, one of the original counties in the territory, and a fort in eastern Wyoming Territory, simply because of where the LaRamee river flowed. Laying track at a rate of about 10 miles a day, the Union Pacific helped build the transcontinental railroad. When the UP located their track 40 miles west of Cheyenne, they created another tent town to service the railroad workers. Since the town was located next to the Laramie River, it was called Laramie.

Those hardy souls riding the first train from Omaha to Laramie City on May 10, 1868, were in for a severe case of culture shock. Except for the slight break in scenery when the tracks crossed the Laramie Range, they were mostly surrounded by endless prairie. It must have been somewhat overpowering, totally awesome, and, to some, even frightening. For as an old dying cowpoke was heard to say, Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie, where the wild coyotes will howl o’er me.

That first train carried one of the city’s founding fathers, whose name was Edward Ivinson. He and his wife, Jane, stepped off the train—somewhat dismayed at the vastness of the prairie and the everlasting wind. Ivinson started out in the mercantile business, but it wasn’t long until he found his true callings—banking and brokering in ties for the Union Pacific. As a result, he became a kingpin in Laramie’s development, and he remained thus until his retirement in 1921.

Congress approved the Wyoming Organic Act on July 25, 1868, but because of differences of opinion with Pres. Andrew Johnson over political appointees, Wyoming did not become a territory until April 15, 1869. For the next decade, Wyoming’s tenuous survival as a territory was nothing short of a crapshoot. There seemed to be no solution to the so-called Native American problem, and the Union Pacific was anything but friendly with the new territory. Laramie’s very sparse population fought for its survival. However, somewhere along the way, the gods must have smiled down on this wild and woolly land. By 1880, the territory’s existence had become secure, and by then, Laramie was a prominent stopover along the Union Pacific Railroad.

Actually, during those early years, Laramie fared better than the territory. Right next to the tracks, the railroad built a nice depot, hotel, and a roundhouse to repair their steam engines. They ran a water line from the city springs east of town to bring in water for their engines. There was a lot of growth in the city during the 1870s, beginning in 1870 when a mixed jury of men and women were called to decide the fate of a man accused of manslaughter. It was the first time in history that women had been subpoenaed for jury duty. Laramie built a brand-new courthouse in 1871, and in 1872, a territorial prison was built just west of the city limits. In 1875, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company built a rolling mill to recycle scrap metal into railroad rails and machine parts.

During the 1880s, Laramie’s growth began to slow a bit. In 1881, a new journalist named Edgar Wilson Bill Nye arrived in town. It wasn’t long until he established a Laramie newspaper named the Laramie Boomerang, which is still published today. In 1882, Fort Sanders, south of town, a frontier military post since 1866, was decommissioned and closed. That same year, Laramie got its first telephone exchange, and soon any number of phones could be found in homes around town. In 1885, Laramie acquired a glass factory, which lasted less than 10 years. The University of Wyoming, with one building located right in the middle of a buffalo wallow, first opened its doors in 1887, with an enrollment of 42 students. The winter of 1886–1887 was a tough one for everybody concerned. Unrelenting snow and wind continually hammered the state. As a result, the loss of sheep and cattle that winter was monumental. Forever after, historians would refer to it as the year of the white death.

Somehow everybody muddled through, and suddenly the 20th century was here. On September 14, 1901, Teddy Roosevelt became president, setting the tone for an optimistic future. The university continued to grow, adding fraternities and sororities to the academic mix. The variety of university presidents down through the years can only be described as the good, the bad, and the short-lived. Beginning in the last quarter of the 19th century, Laramie became a whistle-stop for a number of U.S. presidents, including John Garfield, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy.

From the beginning, Laramie industries were major contributors. Through the years, Laramie had a rolling mill, two plaster mills, two stone quarries, and a creosote plant. The railroad had an ice storage plant, and stockyards were built nearby. The Great Depression, or The Dirty Thirties, as it was sometimes called out West, hit Laramie just as hard as it did the rest of the country. That old song, Hey Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, was on everybody’s lips. It was the beginning of World War II before the country began to recover.

From the beginning, Laramie has had the lion’s share of bordellos. But with the departure of the railroad repair